Leave Society

writer who makes so much of stepping out of the social circle, patly denouncing its bodily harms society is a mess of toxins, radioactivity, and shaky healthcare barely has a toehold in it to begin with.
Francisco Unger, n+1

Leave Society s focus ranging from the individual to the familial to the cosmic is exciting because it doesn t play by any rules of our current culture. It eschews easy formulations of attitudes towards everything from medicine to politics.
Alan Rossi, X-R-A-Y
 
In an era of proliferating controversial theories, Tao s book celebrates the ability of science to refuse certainty and open up a space of unknowing.
Ross Simonini, ArtReview

Despite Li s crippling bouts of worry, physical pain, and moroseness, there is a very moving resilience that goads him out of each abyss and back into the ring, the ring here being the realm of consciousness that Li continually seeks to know better, to expand, to care for more effectively.
Kristen Iskandrian, Hobart

Lin s narrator s relentless self-improvement feels at once familiar and alienating. I see my own similar tendencies and wonder whether they are paths to transcendence or just ways to focus an unrelenting anxiety. While I cannot answer these questions, I do know that I appreciate that this novel and its author are oriented toward finding a better way of living.
Leah Dieterich, Document Journal

Lin's style a tone predicated on a lucid knowledge of the difficulty of its own transmission, in critic Frank Guan's formulation is so unique it reminds us of Woolf's praise of Lawrence: you never catch Lawrence arranging, and no sentence pretends to contain the meaning of the whole novel in it.
Stuart Ross, Eclectica

I fell in love with what I assumed to be Tao Lin's mother.
Michael Silverblatt, KCRW's Bookworm

No one writes like Tao Lin. He is so quietly funny, and surprising, and strange, in the way he writes sentences, in the way that he thinks. Leave Society is transcendent in its honesty and is even transcendent in its transcendency, by which I mean Tao Lin remains transparent even while delving into subject matter difficult to render on the page, like drug experiences and ponderings into the origins of philosophical systems in human societies since time immemorial. He makes the mysterious mundane and the mundane mysterious. But the book is so very readable and accessible and fun, even while exploring pain and family relationships, and yes the question about remaining a part of a society that can and will bring you harm in countless invisible ways, that has been designed to exploit the earth s natural resources including its people. I love this novel.
Tommy Orange, author of There There

"Leave Society is fascinating and touching. Lin has a unique style, with which he vividly communicates the quest for healing and love, a quest that is both particular to Lin in its details, but also underlies much of what his generation seeks through new ideas, psychedelics, and alternative lifestyles and worldviews."
Riane Eisler, author of The Chalice and the Blade

"Leave Society is hilarious about serious things, and serious about hilarious things. This is a very special and beautiful book."
Brad Phillips, author of Essays and Fictions

Leave Society is a warm, funny, hearteningly nonconformist book that changed the way I think about natural health, wellbeing, and the great mystery. It s a beautiful work of art. I loved it.
Melissa Broder, author of Milk Fed

Leave Society is a novel I wanted to keep living in long after it ended. The characters are some of my favorites in contemporary fiction. Subversive, neurotic, and artful; it read exactly as I want a Tao Lin novel to read."
Chloe Caldwell, author of Women and I'll Tell You in Person

"It s a meta-autofiction that takes on the grandest of themes the metaphysical structure of the cosmos, the journey of a soul across the aeons, the space beyond death in the hopes of understanding them, and also of creating feelings of awe and wonder in the reader."
Dean Kissick, Spike Art Magazine